Todd Carpenter's new paintings reflect his appreciation of black and white photography with its perceptual subtleties of light. Through his extensive travels as well as further recognition and awareness of details, Todd brings evolved finesse to his subject matter. His push-pull technique moves the paint effortlessly recalling memory while integrating imagination.

Todd continues to create realistic landscapes demonstrating his mastery of black, white, and gray scales. It's the locales in this series that have changed from the real to the imagined. These unique yet familiar places expose a cultivated inventory of light, space, and natural and man-made landmarks to a result that are majestic and graceful.

One of the things I have tried to do with this series is develop the idea of presenting something that looks real without actually portraying a specific place. The intention is to get the light effects close enough to suggest depth and atmosphere, while ignoring the details that would turn these into representations of precise locations. Perhaps viewers will be able to combine these rough representations of spatial properties with the details of their own memories, and thus recall some of their own experiences of the world.

Many of these images are of California and especially the Los Angeles area, and viewers in LA may have the sense that they are looking at a particular familiar place, but each viewer may be recalling a different location. To reinforce this phenomenon, the titles of these images are evocative of California place names. However, the titles in this series do not refer to actual places. Instead, I have used Spanish words that are often included in California place names.

Other paintings are from recent travel to Asia. Although their titles correspond with actual locations, these too represent the experience of a place as opposed to the actual appearance. Many of these images are small, like windows with a view that is hard to discern, vague memories of what it is like to be in another city. ~ T. C., 2011